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Category Archives: Percussion

There were 5 bands, playing about 20 minutes each. I put all the videos on my blog (click below). I really liked the variety – Together (from NYC), the first group, had 4-5 players with dancers/movement, electronics, spoken word, sax, other instruments. DemonSleeper (Andrea Buschman) played various electronic devices. Slusser played a wind instrument that looked like a clarinet and electronics. Ear Spray played fourth. Liver Cancer (reunited), the last group, is a popular harsh noise group that had an encore.

After almost a year of working on videos, Ear Spray finally performed with my live videos!! It was part of a series called Godwaffle Noise Pancakes, which is usually from noon to 2pm in San Francisco, typically at a art exhibit space called the Lab in the Mission district. We had performed several times at the Lab at Godwaffle and other series.

This time Godwaffle was at Life Changing Ministry in Oakland, in a former church. It had not been held in Oakland for about 3 years. I really liked the Oakland location as it is close to Alameda, where I live. Reportedly, it had not been a church for many years but still had a church-like entrance and had been rented to tenants as a house. Over the past few years, experimental musicans, especially of the noise variety, have been scheduling events there. There is lots of equipment, including a pull down screen, which worked great for my videos.

David Slusser’s work history ranges from collaborations with John Zorn to music editing for Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, and co-composing with David Lynch. Delight… demonstrates why — Slusser has a sense of cinematic composition and sound collage that is simply amazing. “Kubrick” is a wide-screen tone-poem that (like all of Slusser’s work) goes beyond any sense of “experimentalism” into something concrete and fully realized, while “Dragon” accompanies the sound of the Chinese language with cymbals, bells, and bowed metallic objects to create sounds that capture the entire image and sense of the dragon in eastern mythology. Other tracks assemble resonances and decays of piano tones into concrete compositions that are as beautiful as they are simply fascinating. An excellent collection that makes your average “experimentalist” seem completely misguided.

I saw Gravity this weekend, the new movie about astronauts in space. I’m a big science fiction fan. It was one of the best movies I have ever seen. I have been working on video projections for the past 3 months for Ear Spray gigs. I will be using two videos with views of earth from the space station for my first time doing videos at our performance 10/20/13 at Berkeley Arts at 8pm. I didn’t know about Gravity when I first started using the space station videos. What a coincidence!!

In my college years I studied science and worked in labs for 7 years after graduating. I still really like science. Almost all the videos I am using are science-oriented – sea urchin eggs, cloud formations, water patterns, weather patterns, molecules, DNA, etc. With effects, of course ;>

I’m doing my first videos with Ear Spray on 10/20/13. Finally got set up with a projector and ipad software. I studied video production and did video documentaries back in the 80s, after doing still black and white photography for quite a while. The quality of the videos was way inferior to film and the equipment was very expensive to rent, so I quit after a few years. I really liked editing but it was way too slow and clunky. Fast forward to today. For the past three years I have been recording my performances (and a few other groups) on my iphone and posting to youtube. I use imovie for editing. Don’t need anything fancy for youtube!!

I have been practicing doing videos and vocals at the Tuesday evening free jazz/improv jam at Berkeley Arts for about 6 weeks. If I can do videos with the wide variety of instruments and playing styles on Tuesday nights, I can do them most anywhere. Fortunately, the vocals are very easy for me and I don’t have to think about them much.

I will be doing videos, percussion, and vocals at the same time. I hope my head does not explode ;>

Lynner’s Mystery Serge looked almost new, even though it was originally built in 1975. It had been renovated and upgraded. Even the patch cords looked new. The sounds were pristine and melodic and were simple and easy to follow, which I like.
Usually when I see an old analog synth, it looks pretty beat up.

He had another “box” with knobs but I did not write down the name of it.

He also played slide guitar and synth keyboard at the same time. Interesting and unusual.

Doug is definitely an “old timer” in the synth world!!

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Here’s the bio from Outsound event page on Facebook
Doug Lynner performs, composes and records using vintage and contemporary analog modular synthesizers, digital and virtual synthesizers and traditional instruments. Of special note is Doug’s Mystery Serge, an amazingly versatile analog modular synthesizer designed by West Coast synthesizer pioneer, Serge Tcherepnin.

Created in 1975, the Mystery Serge has been painstakingly conserved and upgraded and stands more than well in comparison to contemporary analog modular synthesizers. Its unique design gave rise to “patch programmability,” the ability to reconfigure a single module for many different uses by patching it differently.
Doug Lynner’s music is based upon the notion of “sound for sound’s sake”

He explores the intrinsic value of sound through mixtures of ambient, avant garde, rhythmic and soundscape genres.
In addition to his avant garde, experimental composition and music journalism, Doug is a pioneer in live rock performance with synthesizers and a founding member of the synth pop recording acts LEM, Mobius and Invisible Zoo.

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From his Web site:
Doug received a BFA in Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts where his mentors were Morton Subotnick, Harold Budd, James Tenney, Leonid Hambro and Nicholas England. There he was deeply immersed in music technology and compositional processes as well as being instructed in world music genres such as south Indian flute, Gamelan Orchestra and Pigmy and Bushmen rhythmic singing and playing.

He sometimes performs in the Santa Cruz area.Disclaimer: I am not an electronic musician but love the sound of those vintage analog synths!! My band partner in Ear Spray, Carlos Jennings, plays one regularly.

On Sunday I went to a 2-hour workshop “Communications for Independent Musicians” taught by Lisa Mezzacappa, Bay Area bassist/bandleader and arts organizer. This was on the first day of the Outsound New Music Summit.

It was the best marketing workshop I have ever attended. I have written about, and taught, business marketing classes for over 20 years. Also, I have attended many workshops on business topics.

Most marketing workshops go over way too much material, not all of it relevant to attendees. Lisa selected two specific topics: musician and band/group bios. It was for improv/experimental musicians, which also really helped focus the workship.

She focused on the basis of any business – what are you about? Why would someone book you? Why would anyone contact you to perform with their group? Describe yourself and your group in 100 words or less.

First Lisa went over sample bios for local musicans, then one person volunteered to have his bio done. Lisa and the attendees contributed ideas. Then, she did the same for a band/group bio.

She kept the workshop on track and ended on time. No attendee “speeches” about their life stories, etc. I like that.

When writing up this story, where did I get her bio? From the Outsound Music Festival’s page at http://outsound.org/summit/13/schedule_details13.html ! I am a business writer and really hate it when I can’t find a bio, or have to rewrite it. Where did I get her foto? From the same place.

If I wanted to write about your group, where would I find your bio that is ready to go and needs no editing, and a good foto?

Several attendees mentioned that no one went to their web sites. Another mentioned keywords, meta tags, etc. One of the best ways to get listed near the top of a google search is to regularly have new content. I set up my band page a few weeks ago, using wordpress. I set it up as a band page, but I could also blog. I realized that I could write about any topic. Blogs are very “loose” as compared with traditional writing.

Instead of posting only on Facebook, I first wrote this post on my blog at http://www.earspraymusic.com and then “shared” it on Facebook. Instead of subscribing to an email mailing list, a real hassle to manage, I can encourage readers to “follow” my band blog.

If you go to my blog, you can see my old bios. If you subscribe to my blog, you can see my greatly improved bios when they are posted!!

Some music topics you could write about: performances you’ve attended, a new music “toy” you just got, a youtube video, a soundcloud song, what you’re doing in your music, etc. I’m working on adding video to our performances. My first post was about that. Or, you could post more personal info, such as what is usually posted on Facebook.

I made a commitment to post something at least once a week.

Just Do It!!!

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Back in the “stone age” of video in the 1980s I took classes and worked on documentary videos. I came from black and white still photography and did not like the relatively poor image quality, although I loved video production – recording, editing, etc. Also the equipment was very expensive to rent and the video tape stretched when played. Fortunately, editing is really, really easy now due to the software. I started taking videos of other musicians performing about two years ago, using my iphone camera. When I got an iphone 5 I recorded everything in HD. I also recorded almost all of Ear Spray’s gigs. It was ok, but not very creative.I put all the videos on youtube and used iMovie for the Mac, an very, very easy program to use. Since I was posting to youtube “quality” was not a big deal as the videos are compressed.

A few months ago I decided to use videos projected behind Ear Spray while we perform. Recording and editing is very easy. But, wow, the projectors have really changed!! My iphone records in HD, so, of course, I had to have an HD projector. I had not used a video projector for a long time, so it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted, since I am very picky about quality of the projected images – must be HD. One of my first projects is to have live video of Carlos playing. Mark and I move around but Carlos is trapped to his table of electronics. I will have a video camera focused on his table to show what he is doing.See the foto below.

I studied science in high school and college and am working on videos using science-related footage. Hopefully by this fall I will have some video ready to go. Carlos and I attended a performance at Davis Hall in San Francisco of Phillip Glass’ live music accompanying the film Koyaanisqatsi. I got so many ideas!!

Good thing we have Mark to play percussion in Ear Spray while I am fiddling with the video stuff!!

Three years ago I set up a myspace page for Ear Spray, when we first started performing together. Of course, soon later myspace went defunct for musicians :< Last fall I started a business wordpress blog that is now almost 60 postings plus lots of comments. After months of working on my business wordpress blog, it didn’t take long to set this one up. It was hard going from html to learning wordpress, which is much less flexible (I had never used templates before), but it worked out well for a band page as it takes little time to manage. Of course, knowing some HTML really helps with WordPress.For setting up this blog, most of my time was spent deciding on a template.